Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation [Paperback]

Stephen Mitchell (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 27, 2002

Stephen Mitchell is widely known for his ability to make ancient masterpieces thrillingly new, to step in where many have tried before and create versions that are definitive for our time. His celebrated version of the Tao Te Ching is the most popular edition in print, and his translations of Jesus, Rilke, Genesis, and Job have won the hearts of readers and critics alike. Stephen Mitchell now brings to the Bhagavad Gita his gift for breathing new life into sacred texts.

The Bhagavad Gita is universally acknowledged as one of the world's literary and spiritual masterpieces. It is the core text of the Hindu tradition and has been treasured by American writers from Emerson and Thoreau to T. S. Eliot, who called it the greatest philosophical poem after the Divine Comedy. There have been more than two hundred English translations of the Gita, including many competent literal versions, but not one of them is a superlative literary text in its own right.

Now all that has changed. Stephen Mitchell's Bhagavad Gita sings with the clarity, the vigor, and the intensity of the original Sanskrit. It will, as William Arrowsmith said of Mitchell's translation of The Sonnets to Orpheus, "instantly make every other rendering obsolete."


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

On the list of the greatest spiritual books of all time, the Bhagavad Gita resides permanently in the top echelon. This poem of patently Indian genius sprouted an immense tree of devotional, artistic, and philosophical elaboration in the subcontinent. The scene is a battlefield with the prince Arjuna pitted against his own family, but no sooner does the poem begin than the action reverts inward. Krishna, Arjuna's avatar and spiritual guide, points the way to the supreme wisdom and perfect freedom that lie within everyone's reach. Worship and be faithful, meditate and know reality--these make up the secret of life and lead eventually to the realization that the self is the root of the world. In this titular translation, Stephen Mitchell's rhythms are faultless, making music of this ancient "Song of the Blessed One." Savor his rendition, but nibble around the edges of his introduction. In a bizarre mixture of praise and condescension, Mitchell disregards two millennia of Indian commentary, seeking illumination on the text from Daoism and Zen, with the Gita coming up just shy of full spiritual merit. Perhaps we should take it from Gandhi, who used the Gita as a handbook for life, that it nourishes on many levels. --Brian Bruya --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Mitchell must by now be accounted one of our generation!s heroic translators, having taken on the Book of Job, the Tao te Ching, and Genesis and done so much to popularize Rilke in English. Now he applies his considerable skill and sympathy to one of the most noted sacred texts of Asia, the Bhagavad Gita, and the results are very happy. He works in free-verse quatrains of about three beats per line, and his language flows with great naturalness. Inevitably, this text will remain both ancient and foreign to many modern readers, but Mitchell!s work goes a long way to making these words...[drive] away your ignorance and delusion. Highly recommended.
- away your ignorance and delusion. Highly recommended.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press; First Edition edition (August 27, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609810340
• ISBN-13: 978-0609810347
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #2 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Hinduism > Bhagavad Gita

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

257 of 268 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Translation or interpretive rendering? January 7, 2002

By John S. Ryan

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I really like Stephen Mitchell's work, but it's important to know what you're getting.

What you're ordinarily _not_ getting is a straight-up translation of the source text; you're getting Mitchell's attempt to render the source text into a fine English poem that expresses the spiritual insights he wants it to express. (Examples: his excellent interpretive renderings of the Psalms and the Tao Te Ching. They are excellent interpretive renderings; they are _not_ translations.)

Even when the translation _is_ straightforward, he tends to chop the text to bits and just keep the parts he agrees with. (Examples: his translation of the book of Genesis, which includes the entire text but relegates the "spiritually suspect" parts to an appendix, and his rendering of the book of Job, which includes some terrific translation but omits the speech of Elihu and the poem in praise of wisdom.)

And now he's done the Bhagavad Gita. Has he translated it, or has he interpretively rendered it?

Well, the first point to make is that he _has_ included the entire text and limited himself to offering commentary on the parts he doesn't agree with. (Incidentally, I tend to disagree with the same parts and I understand that there have been Hindu scholars who have at least raised the same questions that Mitchell does.) This point alone means that Mitchell's Gita is a landmark: he hasn't chopped up the text in order to leave out the "spiritually inferior" portions.

So how good is his translation? Well, Mitchell says his own Sanskrit is "rudimentary," but that doesn't mean (as some reviewers seem to think) that he doesn't know any at all. (This is a bit different from his Tao Te Ching, in which he admits that he just doesn't read Chinese....) And this _is_ called a "new translation" rather than a "new interpretation."

But I don't know any Sanskrit at all, so I've just done some short comparisons with other translations. Based on spot-checks against the versions of Barbara Stoller Miller and Juan Mascaro, it looks to me as though Mitchell has stayed pretty close to the source. This is of course not an expert opinion of any kind and I'm prepared to be corrected by anyone who knows better. (And it may not even be much of a test, as Miller's translation in particular was one of the handful Mitchell consulted in preparing his own.)

Either way, what Mitchell is up to here is what he's up to nearly everywhere: he uses the traditional text as a medium to convey his own spiritual insights. And it's pretty clear from the get-go that he regards Lao-Tzu (i.e., _his_ Lao-Tzu) as spiritually superior to the author(s) of the Gita. Some readers may well agree with this evaluation (and I may be one of them; you guess). But all readers should be aware that Mitchell isn't trying to present a reverent discussion of the teachings of the Gita; he's sifting through it to see what parts of it measure up to his own Buddhist-Taoist-Jewish insights.

I am _not_ criticizing this enterprise; far from it. I tend to agree with many of Mitchell's insights, I really really really enjoy his poetic renderings, and on the whole I even admire his chutzpah (although in other books I've seen reason to criticize some of his scholarship). And in the present work he does, for example, raise (and to some extent answer) deep questions about the limits of nonviolence.

But, y'know, caveat emptor and all that. If you buy this book, buy it as Stephen Mitchell's work, not as an introduction to Hinduism through one of its central sacred texts. It's not really fair to describe this as a "boutique" Gita, but on the other hand it _is_ primarily a vehicle for Mitchell himself. I think that, like all of Mitchell's stuff, it's well worth reading and owning, but it depends on what you're looking for. Read more ›

100 of 105 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, accessible and beautifully presented August 2, 2001

By Dennis Littrell HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

First of all this is a beautiful book. The design by Barbara Sturman in which the text is presented in a handsome wine/purple font set in wide margins with the chapter titles in a contemporary font of soft vermillion suggests reverence for the Gita while hinting of a twenty-first century Western appreciation. There is a ribbon sown into the binder for keeping your place.

Second, the emphasis is on the text of the Gita itself garlanded by Mitchell's brief introduction and his "About the Translation" and a most appropriate and valuable appendix, "The Message of the Gita" by Mohandas K. Gandhi from his Collected Works.

Third, there is the translation itself, which is poetic and easily accessible to the contemporary reader without diluting the sacred essence of this great work of spirituality. Mitchell, who has had extensive experience rendering poetic and spiritual works into English, including a much-admired translation of the Tao Te Ching, worked hard at fusing "the dignity of formal verse" into a "sound like natural speech" (p. 32). Rather than go through torturous artificialities in trying to fit all of the text into metric lines, Mitchell has chosen to present some of the Gita in prose. Thus the opening chapter, which he calls "Arjuna's Despair," in which the scene is set and the participants identified, is gracefully told in prose, as is the introduction of the second chapter until Krishna speaks. The effect is beautiful, since it highlights the importance of what Krishna is about to say in a speech that really begins the poem and the teaching. (Shakespeare used this technique.)

Mitchell has solved the problem of the word "yoga," a long time bugaboo for English translators of the Gita, by sometimes using "yoga" and sometimes using "discipline...." I certainty appreciate his discretion, having been annoyed for years by those translators who use only "discipline," a word that in many instances misleads the reader and muddies the text with exactly the wrong meaning and connotation. Restricting himself to the word "discipline" alone, as Mitchell explains, "would be an impoverishment." He adds, "how could one expect the reader to keep a straight face at the image of Krishna as the <Lord of Discipline>?" (p. 33). Krishna is indeed the Lord of Yoga.

Mitchell does not attempt to translate some other terms, like "guna," because, "Attempts to find English equivalents...have been uniformly unsuccessful and confuse more than they clarify" (p. 33). Anyone versed in yoga knows that the gunas--sattva, rajas, and tamas--represent something close to an entire philosophy and cannot be understood without some study. The usual rendering as "qualities" or "strands" is tolerable, but, as Mitchell indicates, impoverished, and sometimes leads to a misrepresentation of the text. (See especially 13.21 and compare it with other translations and to the gloss of Sankara, which can be found in the translation by Swami Nikhilanada (1979) published by the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, and elsewhere.) However not all scholars agree with this. Kees Bolle in his translation (1979), published by the University of California Press, insists that "words like <yoga>, <moksa>, and must be translated" (p. 226). His concluding essay, "On Translating the Bhagavadgita" is a sharp, candid, and entertaining discussion of some of the problems that translators face.

Where Mitchell runs afoul of some readers is in his worldly attitude toward the Gita as revealed in the introduction, where he uses a story by Borges and a reminiscence by Robert J. Oppenheimer to make a couple of points. He also assumes a somewhat Taoist position. To those not conversant with the Tao Te Ching, Mitchell's statement on page 30, "The healthiest way to begin reading and absorbing a text like the Bhagavad Gita is to understand that ultimately it has nothing to teach," is definitely off-putting. To me Mitchell's position is not a detriment and indeed the only proper stance for a translator is secular. The Gita is a sacred work to Hindus and yogis and others, but to people who practice other religions and who have been raised in other traditions, the Gita, while a great poetic and spiritual work, has to take its place alongside the Bible, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran and other religious works. To others, the Gita is, as it was to T.S. Eliot, simply a great philosophical poem. (Eliot considered it second to Dante's the Divine Comedy.)

Mitchell may also startle some uncritical readers of the Gita with his argument in a footnote on pages 200-202 that the last six chapters are not of the same quality as chapters 1-12. He sees a difference in attitude and finds the last six chapters "much inferior...both poetically and spiritually." I tend to agree, but all venerable religious works are uneven and contain different voices. It is also true that the Gita is repetitious to some extent (although that is not necessarily to its disadvantage as a didactic scripture), and even seemingly contradictory. I believe this is an unavoidable consequence of being complex and of having been passed down through many generations both before and after it was written down.

To those who might find Mitchell not completely qualified to bring yet another translation of the Gita into the English-speaking world because, as he admits on page 30, his "knowledge of Sanskrit is rudimentary," I can only say, his is a fine tradition. I am thinking of the poet W. B. Yeats, who also without much Sanskrit, but with the help of Shree Purohit Swami, wrote a beautiful translation of The Ten Principal Upanishads (1937), and of Christopher Isherwood, also without much Sanskrit, but with the help of Swami Prabhavananda, published a graceful rendition of the Gita (1944).

Bottom line: this is a beautiful and valuable book that would enhance anyone's library, and I recommend it highly.

--Dennis Littrell, author of "Yoga: Sacred and Profane (Beyond Hatha Yoga)" Read more ›

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful treatment of the Gita January 23, 2003

By Dean Dobbert

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am mesmerized as I read this book and find within it the common thread that joins all the great holy books of the world. It is beautifully put together and written in such a fashion that it is a pleasure read. I was concerned about another reviewer's comments about this being an "interpretation" rather than a "translation" of the Gita, and so I sat down and compared several chapters of this book to the translation by Sir Edwin Arnold is a more standard treatment of this text. I found that Stephen Mitchell's version was much more readable and understandable, and yet did not take anything away from the authenticity of the actual text. For anyone wishing to take a slightly different path leading to the nearness to God, I highly recommend picking up this book.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction to the Gita May 12, 2005

By "KB" Kamla Srinivasan

Format:Paperback

Over the years I have tried to read the Bhagvad Gita in English, but did not find any good translations that held my interest. While I knew the story, and the underlying philosophy of the book, I often found it a bit disconcerting that I could completely comprehend the sanksrit stanzas.

Mitchell has taken some liberties with this great epic poem, but the end result is a beautiful rendition of the Gita, and I have read and re-read many of the chapters repeatedly marvelling at the clarity and simplicity of Mitchell's rendition of this great epic.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who want to know more about the Gita and its underlyng philosophy.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Mitchell's Gita in a universal spiritual context January 31, 2006

By a spiritual practicioner

Format:Paperback

Remarkable how Mr Mitchell liberates this book from the bondage of Indian philosophy and shows it as the mystical and universal text it needs to be. And with remarkable restraint he represents a universal poem of love to the divine without the western baggage of religiousity and pomp. So there are two qualities to enjoy in this book which put it above other translations.

In the context of 21st century publishing, Mitchell's position is almost unique in having translated and rendered a universal core of spiritual literature. The positioning this book seems pure hearted to me, as part of Mitchell's own seeking, and part of what he has to share to the world. So it is deep in that sense.

But some passages left me puzzled. I know a little bit of sanskrit, much less no doubt than this translator, but specific passages of American will not yield the same nuances of the original language no matter how you twist them, nor will the readership tolerate graceless translations of this luminous poem. It just won't fit into the words!

So the problem if any is between different readerships, the traditional and the modern especially.

The text is beautiful and deep and lovely. I read it over a large coffee in a Borders cafe, then twice at home over the next three days, so its simplicity is not to be doubted. The book really is all it promises to be: a new translation for an open minded readership wishing to gain a quick acquaintence with a deep book. And it works wonders there. Other translations have taken days to read a few chapters at a time and this is so easy to read and digest.

One gripe is that he refers to the female readership in his introduction, because of the male orientation of Krishna's advice.... I don't know that this piece of political correctness adds anything at all to the book's timeless quality. When a poem speaks for all humanity for all time, does Mitchell need to concern himself with the lack of a reference to the feminine gender in the text? Surely women can tolerate a few "he" and "his" without threatening their humanism. Frankly I would prefer the next edition delete this from the introduction.

I love this book and intend to read it many times over. I don't think it suffers from Mitchell's universalist spirituality, nor do I think it will go out of print for many years to come, because it is beautifully packaged, lucid to the point of transparency, and appropriately contextualised for the global spirituality of the 21st century.

I highly recommend it. Read more ›